


To Everything There Is A Story

by DestielsDestiny



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Aftermath of Massacre discussed in some detail, Aftermath of Violence, BAMF Luke, BAMF Poe, Ben is adorable and creepy, Depressed Luke, Family Feels, Force-Sensitive Poe Dameron, Gen, Harm to Children, Leia Organa is awesome, M/M, POV Poe Dameron, Poe is kinda like Han, Protective Luke, Sad Luke, Series of Moments, Skywalker Twins are bamf
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-28
Updated: 2016-06-28
Packaged: 2018-07-18 19:03:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,859
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7326628
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DestielsDestiny/pseuds/DestielsDestiny
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Force is full of stories. Just ask anyone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	To Everything There Is A Story

**Author's Note:**

> A/N: I own nothing.

Poe tells the same story, every time someone asks about his past. Every time someone remembers something more about his face or his name than the fact he is the son of two Alliance heroes. Every time someone carefully doesn’t mention the name Ben. Carefully doesn’t talk about Darth Vader. 

It’s a simple story. And he tells it well, a polished ease tripping almost liquidly from his tongue with every repetition. It never really changes much. 

But everyone who hears it is always left just slightly confused. 

Poe tells a story about a bright eyed, dark, curly haired boy, and his shy best friend. He tells a story about growing up in the shadows of giants, raised across the galaxy, born in a cockpit, learning to fly before they could walk. A story of forests and trees, Wookies and Astro-mechs, laughter and skinned knees, candy and cake. 

He tells a story about a boy who wanted to grow up to be a Jedi, and his best friend, who wanted to grow up to be a pilot, just like his parent before him. 

He tells a story about a boy who wanted to grow up to be just like his father’s father, a boy who worshiped the ground his uncle walked on. A boy who everyone loved, a boy who loved everyone. 

He tells a story about leaving home, growing up, losing one’s way, falling in love, betrayal and tears and running away to join an army. 

He tells a story about two boys who grew up as friends, grew apart as teenagers, and joined opposite sides of a fight for the galaxy’s soul, leaving broken pieces of everything that ever loved them in their collective wake. 

It’s a simple story really. It takes him less than an hour to tell. He tells it often, over and over. He tells it well.

And yet, anyone who listens to it is always left just slightly confused. 

Because no matter how often Poe tells that story, he never quite remembers to mention which boy is which. 

00

The little boy peers out from behind his mother’s legs, somehow not quite shy; something else, something undefinable. Even then, there was always something slightly unsettling about the youngest Solo. 

The name was a compromise, an attempt at a clean legacy, an acknowledgement of one of the few loves in their family that hadn’t brought the galaxy to its knees. 

Not yet anyway. Not then. 

The boy is tall for his age, his lean frame belaying the legacy of a father he still loves to follow around, and a grandfather he doesn’t yet know existed at all. His mother gives him a nudge forward. 

“Go on Ben, say hello.” Leia’s voice sounds distracted, her head swivelled around towards the clearing they’ve just come from. Ben feels suddenly cold in the early morning wind, as his mother not so subtlety puts some distance between her legs and his small, grasping fingers. 

Ben’s Daddy keeps talking about how he needs to make friends. Not to Ben’s face, but his parents have enough arguments about it that they are no longer careful whether he overhears them. They argue about everything these days. Ben hates it. 

The leaves crunch lightly in front of him, a figure of a height with his shoulder appearing before his downturned face. Ben lets his eyes raise almost of their own accord, regarding the out thrust hand stuck awkwardly within an inch of his chin with barely veiled distrust. 

Warm, laughing brown eyes peer out of a sea of curls, the hand bobbing forward insistently. The other boy must have a good three years on Ben, despite his obviously challenged growth. Ben feels his lip begin to curl in disgust. 

His parents are always wanting him to make friends. He frequently finds it tedious in the extreme. It usually ends in bruises somewhere on his body, although he’s careful to make them as self-inflicted as possible these days. 

All it’s gotten him is more concerned looks from his mother. More lectures from his father. 

The hand is still there. Ben stares at it. The boy doesn’t even blink. 

“Hi! I’m Poe Luke Dameron. I was named after Luke Skywalker, and I’m going to be the best pilot in the galaxy one day!”

It’s an utterly childish thing to say, and Ben is two years too into school to still enjoy childish things, especially from someone who is supposedly older than him, someone his parents approve of, but still, he’s young enough that, well, Uncle Luke is still kinda just cool. 

So, maybe he can give his parents an inch. It’s not like they’re there to see him give it anyway. The voices of his parents echoing vaguely beyond the trees, rising in pitch over the brisk breezes, Ben finds his small hand clasping an only slightly larger one in a firm grip. 

“I’m Ben Solo. And Uncle Luke is really lame. I’m gonna be a much cooler Jedi!”

Poe’s grin dims for a second, before quickening into a downright scarily mischievous grin. 

“So I have to talk first huh little buddy? And that’s bullshit. Luke Skywalker is the coolest.” Ben’s mouth opens in protest of being termed little by someone at least an inch shorter than him, but what comes out is a giggle because Poe just swore and maybe they’re both still young and innocent enough that that’s still funny. 

Poe giggles along with him, their still joined fingers quivering in the air between them, and Ben feels his lips crack in the cold as an unfamiliar feeling begins to bloom in his chest. 

Still, he’s not a Solo for nothing. “He’s okay I guess.” 

It’s a minor concession, but Poe Luke Dameron seems satisfied. If the rather gap-toothed grin he’s displaying to Ben is anything to go by. Ben’s never been very good at people. 

His mother always seems to forget he got that from his Dad. So does his Dad.

Poe tugs on Ben’s hand, heading for the small break in the trees ahead of them, out of the wind, away from the distant yells and cold hard facts that have made Ben just about the most cynical six-year-old in the galaxy, according to his father. 

“Come on Ben, you’ve got to see my tree. Luke gave it to me!” And that should make Ben’s stomach curl with jealousy, because Uncle Luke hasn’t even come to see him in ages, let along given him a tree. But that’s the moment Poe chooses to look back over his shoulder, the breeze whipping his hair into a wild halo behind his head, his eyes dancing with the kind of genuine warmth Ben’s only seen on his mother’s face when she tucks him in at night, after he’s pretended to go to sleep, because he’s much too old for that sort of thing, thank you very much. 

Poe’s words wash over him, before being snatched away by the wind, the argument echoing along its eddies and streams like a bad echo. The warmth of them still somehow never quite leaves him. 

“It’s great to meet you Ben! We’re going to be best friends, just you wait and see buddy.”

And they kind of are. 

00

 

The galaxy never learned this story, but it happened all the same: 

There was once a young boy with a loving mother who grew up flying before he could walk. He grew up in the swirl of the force, the crush of a destiny he couldn’t possible understand, and was taken away to learn to be a Jedi before he was ten. 

He met an old man there, a man who spoke to a lonely little boy and pretended to be his only friend, who said I’m the only one who understands what you’re going through. 

He grew up to believe in that old man, above all others. And the galaxy burned. 

The galaxy never learns that story. That boy’s own little boy never learns that story either. 

There is a story that the whole galaxy knows:

It is about a little boy, the son of a loving, heroic mother, a boy with a great legacy on his shoulders, a boy who left home to be trained as a Jedi, a boy who was befriended by an old man who said, I’m the only one who understands what you’re going through. 

The whole galaxy knows the second story. The whole galaxy doesn’t know the first. No one ever knows enough to understand the tragedy in that. 

00

When Poe is seventeen, Ben nearly cuts off his head with a lightsaber. It’s not exactly a surprise.

It’s Ben’s training saber, the one Poe watched the fourteen-year-old lovingly construct with his bare hands and the force. The blade glows as bright cobalt a centimeter from Poe’s eye as it had a foot, all those months before. 

Poe doesn’t officially live at the Jedi Academy base, stone not quite old or grand enough to ever call it an actual Temple. He doesn’t officially live with his father either. 

Officially, he’s been a student at the New Republic Flight Academy since his own sweet fourteen. Officially, he’s there all the time. 

Unofficially, he breezed through his classes in less than a year, but the Academy board looked at his last name and refused to graduate him until he reached his majority, because “just because he’s the son of a war hero doesn’t entitle him to special treatment.” 

Poe doubts his rather stinging reply that he isn’t the son of a war hero, thank you very much, but the son of two, did anything to help his case. 

As it is, he spends much of the next three years the same way he spent the three before that. Following Ben around Yavin 4, learning how to meditate and fight and do just about everything he can with no more ability to access his humungous force potential than he’s ever had. He only sees Kes three times in those three years, for all that his father lives less than five clicks away. 

He sees Luke a least three times a day, so maybe that’s an even trade. By sixteen, Poe has pretty much given up wondering about the crush he’s developed on the last Jedi Master in the galaxy. 

He keeps waiting for Ben to tease him about it, but he never does. Ben never teases Poe about anything anymore. 

In fact, Ben hasn’t so much as spoken a single word to Poe in nearly a month the day Poe is awoken by a shrill screaming inside his head. A screaming that it takes him the entire time it takes him to stumble out of bed and out into the corridor beyond to realize isn’t only one voice, but dozens. 

The bodies are a pretty good hint. As are the scorch marks severing limbs from bodies, doors from walls in indiscriminate piles. 

Poe finds Ben in the Mess hall of all places, still in his sleep shirt. It’s the one Poe gave him for his last lifeday, a caricature of Han Solo holding a crossbow on the front with the words “The galaxy’s worst father” printed across it in bold black script. Ben had loved it. 

Poe hates himself for that shirt pretty much for the rest of his life. 

In that moment though, all he can see is the dark red stains splotching the front of the off blue shirt. Stains that aren’t growing, aren’t seeping through the fabric, but into it. 

Lightsabers are unimaginably hot on their maximum setting, slicing through anything in their path in a burning, searing intensity. 

Training sabers aren’t even hot enough to fully cauterize a cut. Poe can’t even remember how he knows all that. 

He just knows that all it takes is Ben turning towards him, saber humming in his hand, bare feet squelching on the reddened floor. And somehow, just like that, he just knows. 

Knows that Ben is gone forever. Knows it’s not exactly a surprise, somehow.

And if there’s one thing he regrets more than that inauspicious gag gift, it’s his inability to shield his thoughts from his impressionable, hurting, angry best friend. 

The best friend he just wrote off without letting him utter a single word. 

Poe doesn’t try to get out of the way of Ben’s swing. He more than deserves it in his opinion. 

The blow never connects, the hot sound of molten fire connecting with molten lava sparking around the otherwise silent Mess hall. 

Luke Skywalker has never looked more heroic than he does in that moment, black sleep shirt billowing like a cape, loose pants barely on his hips, burns and blood clotting on every inchof his exposed chest and arms, right up onto his clean shaven cheeks. 

He's also never looked quite so old, gazing at his nephew with the kind of grief Poe wouldn’t have thought it was possible for a heart to bear, if his own wasn’t currently still beating as well, despite the same strain. 

Despite all accounts to the contrary, Luke doesn’t actually fight his nephew. He doesn’t hesitate either. He just stands there, lightsabers locked and crackling, Ben’s face an ugly grey in the pre-dawn light filtering through the skylights. 

Poe remembers being very, very scared. 

He doesn’t remember hitting Luke, doesn’t remember even moving. He does remember the look of anger on Ben’s face when Luke turns away to catch Poe’s flailing wrists before they stray too near the interlocked blades, the look of sheer frustration at being ignored in this of all moments. 

Poe doesn’t remember what happens next, but suddenly it’s just the two of them in the silent Mess hall, Luke holding onto Poe’s wrists with a vice-like grip, bodies of children strewn hither and yawn. 

It takes Han Solo a day to respond to their distress call, and by that time, Ben’s well and truly lost to the winds. 

It somehow isn’t until Poe sees the sheer devastated certainty on Ben’s father’s face as he takes in the huddled form of Luke, wrapped around the shivering ball that is Poe like Poe’s a life preserver in a galaxy of cold, dead corpses, the shrouded, too short bodies lined up almost ceremonially all around them, that he realizes Ben took all of their hearts with him. 

 

00

There were whispers once about an old hermit living on the outermost reaches of a vast ocean. An old man, wizened and worn down by life, it was said he had strange powers of persuasion, could move things with his mind. 

It was said he was quite mad, the last of a by gone age. Sometimes, the word Jedi even made it into fearfully whispered conversations on the edges of the darkest, most hidden dives and dens, by those old enough or brave enough to even remember the word. 

Some said he’d once been a soldier, fought in a war, flown through the galaxy. Lost everyone and everything they said. 

There were parts of the story only whispered about, of a young boy who grey up to destroy the galaxy, about a teacher who tried and failed to live up the vast shoulders of his elders, about a desperate mission to save the galaxy, about hope returning. 

By the time those last dregs of the story are reached, it’s mostly considered by everyone around to be legend, as scattered and changeable as the variety of drunken lips it spews forth from. 

But there’s one part that never changes, that is so clichéd that it must be true really, even if everything else is false. 

The old man always dies, long before the end. 

00

Poe has never been very adept at using the force. It’s not that he doesn’t have the potential, at least according Luke, who actually shielded his eyes the first time he saw Poe according to Poe’s mother. The General winced the first time they met, and the other General loved to call him “flashlight” for some reason that escaped a twenty-year-old Poe, but enough time has passed that he’s more than aware of his own force signature, of how bright it is. 

Poe has never much cared that that brightness in no way translated to ability or usefulness, except that what he’s about to attempt would be infinitely easier if he could just call up even a little bit of extra help. Or at least slightly less likely to get them both killed Poe reflected acerbically as he switched off BB’s live stream of “Poe-Idiot, Abort, Abort, Poe-Pilot will get himself and Luke-Pilot kill-“, and jerked the X-Wing’s nose abruptly upwards, aiming steadily for the monochrome standard First Order made viewing port rapidly closing with his cockpit. 

The crash is rather like smashing two stones together, the way he and Ben used to do on Yavin when they practiced targeting by throwing stuff at each other, because their aim was better with an element of danger being involved.

Except it’s a great deal more dangerous than that activity ever was. 

The General had said to take any measures necessary to rescue her idiot brother from his latest attempt to get killed attempting to negotiate with the we-shoot-diplomats-on-sight branch of the First Order’s military command, although Poe doubts this is even remotely what she had in mind. 

Poe has never been very adept at using the Force, unifying, living, dark, light or anything in between. Except when he’s flying. 

And maybe that simple clause is why this works. It’s certainly why Poe tries it in the first place. And maybe he is no longer technically flying per say by the time he reaches his less scraped hand out towards where the faintest glimmer of dancing blue light filters through the cracks in the durasteel, his ship held together somehow by something that mae be do to the power of wishing at some point, and maybe that’s all the Force really is, belief. 

Poe doesn’t really have time to ponder why his mind is choosing now to get philosophical about something he’s steadfastly attempted to refuse to acknowledge even exists on a good day for even longer than his idol did, doesn’t pause to worry about such a pesky thing as oxygen because suddenly, inexplicably, he finds what he’s looking for. 

Luke Skywalker burns in the Force like a thousand lightsabers, like the suns of Tatooine going nova, as clear and bright and somehow soft now as it was a lifetime ago when Poe first learned what it felt like, fifteen and spitting mad and punching with all his might, missing Ben Solo with a single minded grief that he’s spent two decades attempting to let go of, even a little. 

And maybe Poe’s finally making strides with that, because beyond those blue flickers, beyond that sun going nova is a familiar, earthen, molten presence, red light bouncing off black steel, fire where there should be wind and leaves, burning, painful, broken and jagged. It takes everything Poe has to even glance at it. It takes more than Poe has to ignore it. 

Poe isn’t planning to relate any of this to the General, figures he’s broken her heart enough for one lifetime, but if he ever did, he’d leave out what he did next. 

Namely, Poe figures he’d lose all credibility as a pilot if he ever admitted that he closed his eyes while flying his X-Wing into the side of a re-purposed Star Destroyer and attempting to Force pull a Jedi into the cockpit with one hand. 

Still, he personally thinks that the fact that said Jedi appears literally in his lap, lightsaber, robes and all when he opens them again a second later is pretty damn impressive. 

Naturally, that’s when the oxygen deprivation finally gets him, wilting his daring pilot visage rather dramatically into the arms of Luke Skywalker. 

 

00

Poe wakes up to the wrong Skywalker twin. 

He’s never called General Organa by that name too her face, never seen anyone else do it either. But somehow, that’s how the galaxy’s always remembered them. 

Poe remembers hearing the story of Darth Vader coming back from the Dark Side as a child, remembers the look of love on Luke’s face, the look of boredom on Ben’s, the look of nausea on Leia’s, the look of wonder on his own. 

He remembers thinking it was the best story he’d ever heard. He remembers thinking Luke was a hero. 

Poe looks at the woman he idolizes more than anyone else in the galaxy, and realizes she looks more tired than he’s ever seen her. So he doesn’t ask how Luke is, doesn’t ask where he is, why he isn’t here. He doesn’t mention Ben.

“Are you alright Ma’am?” Leia startles from the pad she’s being pouring over, her eyes drinking in Poe’s animated face, and for a moment there’s an ocean of grief reflected in those brown depths. She doesn’t mention Ben either.

Then he blinks, and she’s the General again. “I would be a damn sight better if my best pilot would stop attempting to get himself killed pulling absurd stunts.” Her tone is as matter a fact as it ever is. 

Poe doesn’t even bat an eye. “I ain’t dead yet Ma’am.” For a second, Poe knows he’s reminded her of Han again, just as he’s been doing since he turned sixteen and developed a roguish streak to rival her husband’s. 

Leia’s eyes soften, the way they used to when he and Ben got in some kind of mischief and were too afraid to tell Luke about it. She squeezes his tube free hand hard enough to hurt. Warm and heavy and safe. 

“See to it that you keep it that way Commander.” Poe squeezes back. 

Poe always loved the story of how Luke saved his father from an Empire. He always thought Luke was a hero for it. And he was. 

But he was also a son who didn’t want to lose the father that he loved. 

It’s taken Poe half a lifetime to understand that’s kind of the same thing after all.   
00  
The Force is full of stories. At thirty-two, Poe knows this better than most. 

Doesn’t stop him from having a favourite though. 

There is a story about a rebellion fighter with doe-like brown eyes who fell in love with a Jedi, the best star pilot in the galaxy. They fought in battles together, crossed the galaxy and back, were separated for years and came back together. 

One of them started out as a boyhood crush, the other became a guilty fantasy, together they matured into a love story for the ages. 

They once kissed in chains, seconds from being executed. One of them is an amazing shot with a blaster, the other one much prefers a lightsaber. One of them is blond, one of them is dark haired. 

One blue eyed to reflect the other’s brown. 

They are both infamously famous. Separately, but not together. 

Nobody knows how the story ends. 

Poe doesn’t know either, but he’s looking forward to finding out.


End file.
